I’m Nicole Negowetti, founder of Food For Us. For more than fifteen years, my work has lived at the intersections of food systems, ecological wellbeing, and democratic life, helping people and institutions navigate complexity together when familiar frameworks no longer hold.
My path has moved through law, policy, teaching, community organizing, and regenerative inquiry. Early in my career, I was a practitioner-scholar teaching food law and policy at Valparaiso University School of Law, Harvard Law School, and Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. I co-founded the Northwest Indiana Food Council and later launched the Sustainable Sourcing Initiative at the Plant Based Foods Institute, convening farmers, food companies, and local leaders around questions of soil health, responsibility, and shared impact.
Across these roles, the lesson that kept emerging is that food is never just food.
It is where health, ecology, labor, identity, power, and belonging meet. It is where institutional failures become tangible, and where communities can rediscover their capacity to repair, regenerate, and reimagine life together.
Over time, my work began to shift from policy reform toward a deeper inquiry that continues to guide me today:
How do people make sense of reality together when shared reference points are breaking down?
What allows collaboration across political and worldview differences without abandoning material truth or ethical boundaries?
How can food, so intimate and so universal, become a doorway into collective agency rather than division?
These questions led me to develop what I now call post-partisan practice: an approach to working across difference that begins from shared material reality and responsibility, rather than ideology or identity alone.
Today, I teach, write, and accompany communities, organizations, and institutions as they:
build capacity to collaborate across difference
investigate material realities together
strengthen local food and care systems
and cultivate the relational infrastructure needed for this era of profound transition
My new book, Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves (January 2026, Georgetown University Press), invites readers to step back from narrow debates about “feeding the world” and instead examine the paradigms shaping our food systems, and our collective possibilities. Like my Substack, Post-Partisan Pathways, it explores regeneration, relationality, and community agency as ways of staying oriented amid ecological, social, and democratic disruption.
Beyond professional life, I’m a mother to two boys, an ultrarunner, and someone who feels most at home in the forest, near water, or around a fire with people exploring what it means to build a livable future together.
Food For Us is my invitation to join that exploration to reclaim nourishment as a shared act of care, to rebuild what has been frayed, and to imagine futures rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and collective wellbeing.